Eastern Illinois runs an up-tempo no-huddle spread offense, and likes to throw the ball all over the field.

Senior quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo finished last season ranked fifth in the FCS in total offense and completed 61.3 percent of his passes. His 3,823 passing yards were a school record for total offense, and he punctuated that with 31 touchdown passes.

He’ll have his favorite target back again this year — senior receiver Erik Lora led the Panthers with 1,664 receiving yards and 12 touchdowns.

That sets up a dangerous opening game for an Aztecs team that is vulnerable at the cornerback position.

The projected starting cornerbacks are junior J.J. Whittaker, who has plenty of potential but has been kept off the field for the last three years due to injury, and Pierre Romain, a sophomore walk-on who saw time at cornerback in one game last year.

Between them, the two corners have never started a college football game, and their backups aren’t much more seasoned.

King Holder started one game at corner for the Aztecs in 2012, while Damontae Kazee is a redshirt freshman who has never been in a college game.

The corners are young and raw, there’s no getting around that.

And it doesn’t help that they’re facing a spread passing attack right out the gates.

But cornerbacks coach Tony White said the kind of offense they will face doesn’t make a difference at this point.

“It’s always a concern every time you’ve got green corners and you’re facing teams that want to throw the ball,” White said. “Spread teams want to throw it all over the place, and as with every team, they want to exploit your weaknesses.

“So it don’t matter if we’re playing a spread, a pro style, a triple option (offense), if they believe your corners are weak, they’re going to attack. So we’ve just got to be ready.”

SDSU will use a four-man rotation at cornerback, but White said he will not decide on the makeup of the rotation until the day before the game.

The coaches have maintained all through fall camp that none of the cornerbacks have distinguished themselves enough to be named starters definitively.

Whittaker and Romain seem to have been the most consistent, but Holder has big play ability, and Kazee has that raw physicality that you can’t teach.

“He’s one of those guys where the ball finds him in a good way,” White said. “When he blows a coverage a bad way, the ball isn’t thrown his way. But then there’s some guys, too, where they do everything right and they still get scored on.”

Sure there’s a degree of luck in that, but Vaughn is progressing quickly enough that he will likely contend for playing time this season.